(un)conventional wisdom: Ian Huckabee

Second in this series of shared wisdom from some of the most interesting people we know comes courtesy of Ian Huckabee of Weejee Media.

Ian is a web marketing strategist and founder of Weejee Media, which specialises in search engine marketing and social media marketing. But more than that, Ian is a natural communicator, lateral thinker, thought-provoker and wise man*. Take it way, Ian:

“It’s now proverbial that most people would rather get one good opinion from a friend on social media than thousands from a search engine. What is relevant today is not necessarily what search engines have indexed but the social signals we pick up in real time. Look at the real time results on Google’s search engine results pages. They include a live feed of updates from Twitter, Facebook fan pages and blogs. Content authority is changing. What blogs ushered in during the early 2000s micro-blogs have escorted to center stage today: your opinion.”

*Ian managed to turn around my entire frame of mind last week with a one-line response to an email. I’d told him my day was a nightmare and I got this in return: “Turn it into a dream”. We all need friends and collaborators like this.

3 Responses to “(un)conventional wisdom: Ian Huckabee”

Interesting therefore that if that is the case, and ‘your opinion’ is becoming the mainstay of content authority, then everyone will soon just be a contributor the web and not a user.
After all – would you upload your opinion and then download someone elses?

Can you be a contributor AND a user? Might that be the norm, or the norm in the future? It’s how I’d define my web use, I think. Admittedly, user vs contributor is an important distinction for companies that make their money from the web…but perhaps we/they have to acknowledge that as the web and social media in particular become ubiquitous, we adopt different roles, depending on our needs at a given time? Going back to content authority though, aren’t we shifting here too? Opinions are very valid on the web and increasingly trusted – but users are getting savvy… we are getting used to almost unknowingly giving different weight to the opinion of someone we don’t know, the shared opinion of the masses and the opinion of someone we know of and generally like what they have to say, versus more traditional online content sources…

I think I get what Ian is talking about. It’s about getting involved in the conversation. Like when you were a kid and you weren’t sure that your jeans were cool (remember Levi’s, not Lee – orange tag, not red) and you needed a few of your friends to reassure you. Tapping into the web has extended that conversation and made feedback virtual and immediate. Ian’s got some good cookin’!